German FSFE activities in 2013

Looking back to 2013, the German FSFE team had an active year. Lots of volunteers spent their time to promote Free Software at events, meetings, by giving speeches, or online. Some highlights of our work in 2013 include:

We continued to defend the rights of device owners to change software on their computers.

• We gave a several talks about the topic after publishing of our analysis about "Secure Boot" we were invited to a workshop from the Ministry of Economics about the German Government's White paper this topic. There were three talks on this topic: one by the Trusted Computing Group, one by Microsoft, and one by FSFE.
• We informed the public and the German authorities about the danger of compulsory routers with big media attention. The result was, that this topic is now covered in the new government's coalition agreement. Max summarised our points in English to prevent similar situations in other countries, and he is following up on this issue.

We informed politicians about the danger of software patents with the result that the German Parliament told the government to strictly limit patents on software. I was invited as expert in the German Parliament for this hearing.

Soeren organised a Hacking for Compliance workshop in cooperation with gplviolations.org.

We have active Fellowship meetings in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, new ones in Munich organised by Christian Kalkhoff, and Guido Arnold reactivated the Rhein/Main Fellowship meetings. Furthermore there is also a good perspective for regular meetings in Bonn and Cologne for 2014.

We participated at every meeting of the "Enquete Commission Internet and Digital Society" (Enquete Kommission Internet und Digitale Gesellschaft) of the German Bundestag. We answered questions from the politicians and send them background information. The final report from the working group "interoperability, standards, and Free Software" will help political staff to learn more about the topic. It includes a texts by us (e.g. about "Secure Boot"), and there was a thank you note to FSFE in the introduction.

For DFD with 59 events in 30 countries worldwide we again helped people to understand the importance of Open Standards. The German award went to the newspaper TAZ.

We again gave lots of talks and participated in panel discussions. E.g. Michael Stehmann in the local parliament, and of course at Free Software events. We organise a conference track at Linuxtag, and where present in new locations, e.g. the street festivals in Munich from our newly activated Fellowship group there. Especially Torsten and Erik were active giving radio interview.

We send questions to political parties for all elections, and evaluated the answers to follow-up with the politicians.